


considering drinking with molotov

by iceberry



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Chronic Illness, Dissociation, Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Season/Series 08, Trials of Hell (Supernatural), mentions of trauma, sorry i keep writing character studies?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-11
Updated: 2020-10-11
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:33:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26940709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iceberry/pseuds/iceberry
Summary: It's been three months since the first Trial. Three weeks since the second. There's no discernible pattern to why Sam feels the way he does each day - some days he wakes up and can limp his way through a job, kill a djinn and only need to sleep for 12 hours before he can function again instead of 18. Other days, he's worse.These days, he's a lot worse.(set between 8x20 and 8x21)
Relationships: Castiel/Sam Winchester, Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 46





	considering drinking with molotov

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to sophie for looking this over and also enabling me to continue my insane 2020 spiral back into supernatural <3

The bunker isn't home. It's a useful base of operations and somewhere to sleep and a place to organize research. It's resources and weapons and lore and far too big and cold to ever be _home,_ whatever that word even means for him anymore, as if he’s ever really had one.

 _But_ , Sam figures between retches, _better to be throwing up here than in the bathroom of a pay-per-hour motel_. It’s something small to be grateful for. His stomach aches when he finally spits out the last of the thin bile and dark blood he's hacked up and he wipes off his mouth. 

(Sam can tell the difference between the blood he's coughed up and the blood he vomits now, which is a disquieting revelation he tries not to think about too much.) 

The pain comes from hunger at first, pangs of discomfort now that his stomach is completely emptied. When he leans back on his heels but stays on the floor another moment (just in case), he feels the deeper ache of his abdominal muscles, sore from tightening. Throwing up after he rolls out of bed has become a morning ritual, just as sure as brushing his teeth or drinking coffee is. He hasn't mentioned this particular symptom to Dean, partially because his brother doesn't need anything new to worry about, and partially because he can already hear the shitty joke Dean will try to make about him having morning sickness to try and get them both to avoid thinking about how bad Sam is doing.

It's not that Sam _can't_ keep the contents of his stomach down if he grits his teeth and focuses, but it's so much easier to throw up - by far the easiest way to get rid of the nausea for a bit. As soon as he eats, it starts up again, but he'll take the gnaw of hunger in exchange for a few hours without wanting to hurl.

He flushes the toilet, gets up, washes his hands, brushes his teeth (well), drinks water to try and soothe his acid-burned throat and stops when he feels like he might need to throw up the water. (It wouldn't be the first time). He leans against the sink to ease his way back to standing upright and then to walking, rests his head against the cool mirror for a moment.

It's been three months since the first Trial. Three weeks since the second. There's no discernible pattern to why he feels the way he does each day - some days he wakes up and can limp his way through a job, kill a djinn and only need to sleep for 12 hours before he can function again instead of 18. Other days, he's worse.

These days, he's a _lot_ worse.

◎

"Lunch," Dean calls, and Sam raises his head from his hands in time to see his brother walk in with a bowl of soup and a sandwich on a chipped plate. The dishes are placed inelegantly in front of him, right on top of the manuscripts Sam was poring over before his headache got too bad to focus and the words began to swim.

"What are you doing?" Sam says, pushing his chair back, the potential of damage to the papers by way of tomato soup shaking him out of his haze a little. "Dean, these papyrus are thousands of years old, you can't just put _soup_ on them." He starts to unwrap the blanket that he has tight around his shoulders to free up his arms enough to move the food, shaking his head in disbelief.

"Don't bitch at me, I made you soup," Dean says, but it isn't lost on Sam that he does move the plate back while Sam is still untangling himself from the fleece wrapped around his shoulders.

Blankets are an indulgence when you’re a Winchester. Winchesters sleep in their clothes, on top of military-regulation tightly made beds, weapon at the ready. The things in the dark won't wait for you to climb out from under the covers to attack you. If it’s cold, you can lay a coat over your side without putting yourself at too much risk. When their dad was out of the picture the two of them usually slept a bit more like _normal fucking people_ , but habits die hard. It drove Amelia crazy that he’d always end up pushing the covers off his side when he shared a bed with her; Jess was just grateful that he didn’t care when she stole the blankets.

So it’s not without grievance that Sam has grown used to bringing one into the library with him to wrap tight around his shoulders whenever a full-body chill comes on, unpredictable but frequent.

"Eat," Dean says, hovering behind Sam's shoulder.

“You staring at the back of my head isn’t helping my appetite,” Sam says, but picks up the spoon.

“Don’t care, you need to eat.” Sam raises the soup to his lips, feeling his stomach twist the second it’s close enough to smell it. He knows it’s perfectly benign canned tomato soup, dumped into a pot with some water till hot, but it smells _wrong_ , like all food seems to nowadays. Too sweet with a pungent acidity that he knows will hurt more coming up. Dean hasn’t moved, so Sam takes a deep breath and swallows the soup. He can hold it down for a bit.

“Good,” Dean says. “That better be all gone when I get back.” He slaps Sam on the shoulder and leaves his younger brother alone to wrap the blanket back around his shoulders. The second he’s out of eyesight, Sam puts the spoon down and starts to plan the easiest way to get to the sink in the entryway and dump it out.

Truthfully, Dean is right to worry. These aches aren't like the infinite varieties of hurt he remembers from the cage, or the sharp pain of pressing down on the mangled nerves of his hand scar, or the desperate cravings of detoxing from the demon blood. It's deeper. It's _slower_. It feels like his body is rejecting the very processes it needs to run. 

There's plenty of aspects of human existence that Sam has learned not to take for granted, that he appreciates more than most - having a half-functioning brain without any hallucinations, for example. But he’s realizing there’s so many more. He wishes he had been more thankful for the days when his joints didn’t ache, eyes didn’t water, head didn’t make him wince every time he turned it too fast. In the weeks after the first Trial, the issue of his body falling apart became more and more apparent with each bloody tissue he tossed into the trash, shifting from a fleeting worry to a constant awareness. Now it’s everywhere; it’s a deep sick wrongness that he finds hard to express because by the time he knows how to explain the way his muscles are always sore or his lungs aren’t filling with air the way they should his hands will be shaking and then he’d have to explain those too.

 _Better left unsaid_ , he thinks _._ It's easier.

◎

It's a special kind of torture - _and he would know, wouldn’t he?_ \- to spend each day exhausted and in pain and for sleep to be harder and harder to achieve. The shitty mattress he refuses to replace probably isn't helping, but he knows even the highest quality memory foam wouldn't be enough to fix this.

Occasionally, lying awake in bed, his memories drift back to a night in a motel a long, long time ago, back when they were too young to go on jobs with their dad. Or maybe they're memories of Dean _telling_ him about the night to when they're teens - the distinction hardly matters, and Sam is too tired to peel back the differences. He's five or six in the memory, some time after his broken arm from jumping off the shed healed up. He'd worn himself out that day, between playing with Dean and running through whatever insane drills his dad felt were appropriate for a kindergartener to do. 

Laying next to Dean in their shared bed, he closed his eyes, and laid there and waited. Pulled the covers over himself a little tighter - back when they were young enough that blankets were allowed as a tolerable indulgence. But sleep never came, and with each minute passing on the motel’s side-table clock, he was more and more restless.

"Sammy, stop tossing," Dean whispered across the comforter, quiet enough that their dad couldn’t hear. "You gotta sleep."

"I'm too _tired_ to sleep," Sam replied, and Dean had just scoffed and rolled his eyes at the contradiction before turning back over and falling asleep. Seeing the clock had made it worse. It felt like he was _losing_ some kind of battle against his body every time the glowing numbers flipped forwards. He was so tired that trying to focus on sleeping had seemed unbearably difficult, too exhausted to relax enough to drift off. It had been easier to lay there in a half-conscious daze, ignoring the glow of the clock, waiting for sleep to sneak up behind him. It eventually did, but the memory of being too exhausted to rest stuck with him; he's spent too many recent nights with it at the front of his mind.

It’s the _awareness_ that’s the thing, really. It’s impossible _not_ to be aware of his body when his chest rattles every time he tries to slow his breathing down and relax his muscles, when his mouth tastes like iron and bile no matter how much water he washes it out with, when he turns his body over to press his face to the cooler parts of the pillow and he has to grit his teeth as his joints take a second to acclimate to the new points he’s putting pressure on. Not that any hunter has a good relationship with sleep, but he finds himself regretting that he didn’t appreciate just being able to collapse exhausted into bed and have that be enough to go lights out.

Sleep eventually comes, sweat-drenched and restless. He'll wake up at 4 A.M. to strip off a shirt he's soaked through, then wake up an hour later shivering so hard his teeth clatter. His hair sticks to his forehead, falls damp into his eyes. The actual blood is washed out, but there’s stains on his pillowcase from nocturnal coughing fits and bloody noses. He'll sleep fourteen hours out of the day, but rarely more than a handful at a time. Of course there’s nightmares, there’s _always_ nightmares, but there’s new dreams too, dreams that only started after the second trial.

He dreams of Cas. A lot. Of the angel coming to him in the Bunker, placing his hands on Sam's cheeks and gently taking the pain away. He has to shut his eyes when the white light begins to emanate from Castiel’s palms, but he doesn’t need to see it to feel the warmth of magic flowing through him, repairing the damage the Trials have done. Sometimes Cas' hands will cradle his cheeks a few moments after he’s done healing, and Sam never tries to stop him or move away, but will lean into the touch. Those are the simple dreams, the pleasant ones, which means they’re rare.

Other times the real world peeks through and his dreams remember what Cas told Dean, who finally caved and told Sam after he gave Sam one too many worried frowns - that he's been changed on a _molecular_ level. And Cas simply takes Sam's hand in his own and looks at him with pity, knowing there’s nothing that can be done, by Castiel or anyone else. Sometimes he'll press a hand to Sam's cheek and look at him with sad eyes, but no light comes to ease his pain; it's not even worth trying. Once he was just the Boy with the Demon Blood to Cas, now he's a lost cause. No one can save him now, and on the worst nights, he wonders if anyone ever could.

In the abstract sort of way you wonder things within dreams, he wonders if Cas could tell him if the changes were good, if they were purifying him. That if on a molecular level the demonic... biochemistry, or whatever, that makes him _just_ less than human is being destroyed along with the rest of hell. If he’ll ever be clean.

He tries not to think too hard about any of the dreams when he wakes up.

◎

Work is aimless since the djinn and that's only making things worse. They can (and do) look for cases the normal way, trawling the web for anything unusual in the lower 48, but Dean gets his phone out and passes it on to any hunter he can find in the general vicinity of the reports before Sam can even pack a bag. And at this point, Sam can't even argue too much about it. He times how long it takes him to reload his pistol daily, and with his shaking hands can’t even match the speed he had when he was eight and had been doing it less than a year. But the less he can do outside the bunker, the more he feels like he can't stop doing work in here, or he’ll go crazy thinking about how his body is falling apart and they still don't know what the third Trial is and if he can even make it long enough to complete it.

So Sam _makes_ work for himself, busywork and tasks that he pulls out of thin air just to keep his mind off of things.

There's no textbook on how to survive closing the gates of hell, but there’s an entire library at his disposal. He reads as many books on demons as he can find. He has to take breaks twice as often for his headaches when he reads the Latin, but not enough to persuade him to stick to the English texts. There’s demons he’s never heard of, _types_ of demons he thinks might be extinct, unfamiliar names, names that remind him why he’s taking on the burden of the Trials in the first place - _Aza’zyel_ , _Za-za-e’il, Azazel_. 

_Morningstar_. He doesn’t linger on those details.

The filing cabinets prove fruitful. The Men of Letters didn't hesitate to keep careful notes on the different unnatural ways people could fall ill and die, sometimes under their watch. ( _Did the Men of Letters have hunters' funerals?_ he wonders. _Or were pyres too uncivilized for them too?_ ) Cursed objects that made people’s hearts stop, spells gone wrong that made the caster suffer a fever so hot it climbed and climbed until their body gave up and they died soaked in sweat, poisons from monsters that froze the victim’s muscles in place.

And he writes things down, taking careful notes that might be a bit shakier and slower than the ones he took in college but are just as detailed. When Dean isn't hovering around the library, Sam will pull out the pile of notes that he doesn't share with his brother and read through them again and again, crossing this part out or adding something new that he read. There’s no real endpoint to this research - he knows he’s not going to find any answers, not among any of the books he has access to here. But he keeps at it, and it’s a small private comfort.

Sam takes books into his room and reads a page or two during stochastic breaks from sleep, never absorbing any of it before drifting back off; the pile on his nightstand grows anyways, because there’s something comforting about knowing they’re there in case he needs them.

He formulates a theory that he wouldn't be sick if it wasn't for the hell that was _in_ his blood, then recants the theory because there's no lore to prove it and there’s no point to thinking about something that only makes him feel worse. He still believes it, a little.

"Dude, you gotta stop reading this stuff," Dean says, and Sam freezes for a half second before he looks up and realizes Dean isn’t looking over his shoulder at his notes outlining this theory, but instead is thumbing through a book written in dense Latin on the other side of the table. “I don’t understand how you can get through this shit normally, let alone when you’re this tired.”

Sam lets out an exhale of relief and leans over the table, covering the notes with his arms. “I can’t just sit around all day,” he says. “I figure I should at least try to learn something while I’m stuck here.”

“Whatever,” Dean says, and tosses a thinner book he’s picked up back onto the table. “Come eat something.”

◎

Sam has looked in the mirror and not recognized the person staring back at him before. Plenty of times. He dissociates at a frequency he knows would send any half-decent shrink into fits. _Two hundred years of trauma will do that to you_ , he thinks to himself, always careful not to think it too hard and risk grasping the real weight of that.

Somehow this is one of the harder faces to bear, because he still _feels_ … like himself. Tired, in pain, worried about Cas and the Trials, sure, but still like himself. He _should_ recognize himself in the mirror, recognize the body he's in. This time the lack of recognition is more physical. The face that looks back at him is waxen, anemic, gaunt; he’s never looked this sick before. Tiny dark red dots have cropped up below his eyes, delicate blood vessels that a textbook told him can burst when you vomit, scattered like a sad parody of freckles. The circles under his eyes look like bruises. He looks away from his reflection as he coughs, and the trickle of blood out of the corner of his mouth when he looks back up almost makes the man in front of him look more familiar - how many times has he had a busted lip in a fight? 

But he wipes it away and the illusion is gone. _Pretty sad illusion anyways_ , he thinks and frowns, red still smudged on his cheeks.

It's easier for him to control his anger now, compared to when he was younger, but the more he stares at the person in the reflection, the angrier he gets.

He doesn’t know if he's mad at himself or at his body, and he’s so _pissed_ about his new incompetence, it's not worth trying to parse the difference. Because it feels like his own body is working against him to stop the Trials just as much as Hell is. Maybe more than Hell is. Since the Cage, he's always known he can never trust his mind completely, never be _fully_ certain what he sees and hears. But his body - the pain of his scar when he presses down on it for comfort, the movements seared into his muscles from decades of fighting, his ability to fight through the pain when he's knocked down and get back up - he's trusted that, even trusted what's in his blood enough to hate it. It's kept him tethered almost as much as Dean has. Now he can't even trust his own ability to get out of bed in the morning. 

He hasn't lost hope yet, he really hasn't - it's in Sam's nature to believe in the impossible, he still hasn’t learned his lesson - but it's taking more and more energy to convince himself that things will turn out okay, and energy just isn't something he can spare much of right now. He stares at the green eyes in the mirror until his vision starts to swim and he suddenly feels a chill come on.

"Shit," is the only thing he says to his reflection, and he quickly lowers himself to the ground as he starts to get dizzy. Sam's learned there's two kinds of dizzy: vertigo, which nowadays is frequent and makes moving with any dexterity a nightmare but is mostly fine, and 'there's no blood in my brain' dizzy, which is almost never fine. He's gotten faster at recognizing which dizzy spell is which, and is already laying his head back on the ground when a cold sweat breaks out on the back of his neck.

The bathroom is clean enough, but more importantly, the tile is cool against Sam's cheek as he lays there and waits for the blood to make its way back to his skull. He only lays there for a few seconds, just long enough to get back to his room without collapsing in the hall. 

A voice taunts him in the back of his mind as he grimaces and pulls himself up with the sink, catching another glimpse of the stranger in the mirror. _Sam Winchester, always running away._ His brain doesn't supply the helpful nuance of whose voice his subconscious is mocking him with, but it doesn't matter if it's Dean's, Lucifer's, his dad's, his own. 

He can't run away this time, not when his body is the thing that he wants to escape.

There's a ringing in his ears as he makes his way towards the hall, leaning against the wall for support and moving slow. His sight goes black, starting in his peripheral vision and rapidly blocking his entire field of vision, and when he presses his hand to where his hair is stuck to the back of his neck he can feel that the cold sweat never really stopped when he laid down. 

He passes out.

◎

"Are you even still trying to take care of yourself?" Dean asks, and Sam's heard Dean's angry concern his entire life, but his head hurts too much right now to register much beyond "angry."

"Dean, I don't-" There's still blood matted in his hair that wasn't completely washed away after Dean found him sprawled on the ground, and he knows if he let go of the blanket and raised his fingers to it, they would come away sticky. _Another washcloth_ , he thinks, and gets halfway to asking for one before Dean opens his mouth again.

"What do you need? Ibuprofen, acetaminophen, aspirin, ketamine? Do you want _weed_ , that can help with pain -" Dean counts off the painkillers on his fingers as he shouts each one. Sam knows that his brother doesn’t realize that he’s shouting. Or maybe - probably? - he’s not even shouting at all, maybe it’s a combination of frayed senses and past conversations trying to patch up the holes in what Sam’s brain is struggling to process.

"Dean-"

"- You _know_ we know people who can get you stronger stuff, too -"

"Dean, shut up!" Sam finally gets out, wincing at the volume of his own voice; it takes a second before the sharp pain in his temple fades back down to a dull throb. Dean, to his credit, does shut up. He stands there staring at Sam with his eyes filled with worry and his mouth mercifully shut. Sam sits there for a moment, pulls the blanket tighter around his shoulders and uses the quiet to organize his thoughts, pull out what's weighing on him from the jumbled mess inside his skull. "Can you _please_ stop acting like this is just a normal cold? Please," he adds and looks at his brother, can feel how red and watery his eyes must look. "I _physically_ don't have the energy to keep arguing with you."

Dean looks at him for a beat, then pulls the desk chair over to where Sam is sitting on the edge of his bed. He looks at the two beers that he’d had in hand when he'd caught sight of Sam laying on the floor, then up at his brother's tired eyes, and opens one for himself. "I'm just worried about you, man." Quieter.

"I know," Sam says. This conversation is a familiar refrain, but it does feel different this time. Sam knows that Dean knows this isn't normal - maybe not as deeply as Sam can feel it in his blood and bones, but he knows. "I take painkillers, Dean. I know what they're for, I don’t need a reminder, the Trials aren't knocking off my brain cells. Sometimes they help a little, mostly I throw them up." 

His brother's eyes widen before he looks down at the ground. Sam can make an educated guess about where his mind has gone; he can practically see Dean’s impulse to be mad at himself for not noticing and his impulse to be mad at Sam for not telling him battle across Dean's face.

"Why don't you rest then? Just stop forcing yourself to sit here and stare at these ancient books until your head pops." Dean picks up one of the books left open on Sam’s nightstand, a 18th century text on methods of contacting souls in hell, and slams it shut as if to prove his point. "Just rest up, watch dumb TV, drink a fifth of whiskey and pass out. Kevin’s gonna turn up." 

The slamming of the book releases a cloud of dust into the air, which Sam attempts to turn his head away from but fails to completely avoid. The conversation pauses while Sam tries to keep his lungs in his chest cavity, pulling out a tissue to wipe away the bright red sputum he knows the cough is going to produce. Dean watches Sam cough for a few seconds, then turns away to glare at the book, blaming it for his brother's coughing fit.

"You think I can handle drinking right now, Dean?" Sam says a minute later, voice still cracked from coughing. He looks at the unopened beer and shakes his head. Alcohol was one of the first things he noticed. After the first Trial, more than two beers left him feeling hungover the next day; after the second Trial alcohol won’t even settle in his stomach long enough for him to feel it in the rest of his body. "I've thrown up or dumped out every beer you've handed me this week."

"Waste of perfectly good beer," Dean mutters after a moment, looking away. 

"No amount of rest is going to fix me. I can't pop some vitamin C and wait for my immune system to kick in on this one." He doesn’t need to finish the implications of that out loud - that his immune system won’t be any help here. The call is from inside the house.

"And stop trying to get me to eat," Sam adds. "Just _smelling_ food makes me feel sick.”

"No way," Dean says, putting the bottle down on Sam's nightstand and crossing his arms. "I’m drawing the line there. I get it, I do, but you can't ask me not to feed you."

And there's the push-pull, the same back-and-forth routine they've been rehearsing their entire lives. Sam just wants to be left to fall apart on his own, but Dean could never allow that, could he? Who are they if Dean isn't trying to take care of Sam and Sam isn't trying to pull away? Sam realizes with a start that he's almost a little resentful of it, that after how many times Dean's made it clear that Sam’s a disappointment, he still won’t step back and let Sam _prove_ that he can make it through this.

“Dean, I’m _trying_ , okay? I am,” he raises his voice again, not yelling, but loud enough that Dean has to hear him. Even if his brother doesn’t listen. “It’s just like you said. The only way out is through, _this_ is through, and I’m gonna get through it, I _promise_. I’m not giving up. I'm trying.” They’ve had this argument before, they’ll have it again before the Trials are through. _Believe me_ , he almost adds. _Just this one time, believe me_. 

Sam can feel Dean scrutinizing him, but he doesn’t look up to try and parse his brother’s expression in any more detail. If Dean doesn't believe him, Sam doesn't really want to know. He wants to get the blood out of his hair and go back to sleep.

“Can you get me another washcloth?”

"Yeah. Okay." 

**Author's Note:**

> sometimes you write fic because you think there's an audience for it! sometimes you write it bc a character has an arc that involves chronic illness and you have stuff to work out!!! if there is somehow an audience for this, well, i’m glad! title from boreas by the oh hellos
> 
> the tiny bit of samcas doesn't necessarily have to be read that way if you REALLY dont want to. sometimes you just dream about your bros gently cradling your face in their hands
> 
> @tube_ebooks on twitter, i will Never Stop Tweeting.


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